1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a technique of splitting a display zone, more particularly to a technique of splitting a display zone which is applicable to a widescreen.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, widescreen notebook computers have been quite popular on the market. Although the actual area of a widescreen may not be much larger than that of a traditional screen having an aspect ratio of 4:3, for screens of the same size (i.e., same diagonal length), a widescreen appears to be comparatively larger to the user, and is particularly suited for showing films that are made according to the standard definition video format of 16:9.
In other aspects of application, such as word processing and web browsing, a widescreen is comparatively more suited for displaying two windows side by side than the conventional screen. However, with a conventional widescreen notebook computer, the user can only adjust the display proportion of a document manually or adjust/resize the display area by dragging so as to allow for displaying of two windows side by side. That is, the conventional widescreen notebook computer does not support automatic splitting or tiling of a display zone.
As for current techniques directed to splitting of a display zone of a display, Taiwanese Invention Patent Publication No. 200744391 discloses use of a plurality of image processing units to perform shrinking of four or sixteen images to be displayed, respectively, and to store the processed images temporarily in a memory device. The shrunk images are arranged in predetermined regions of a display zone according to a specific order. For example, if the display zone is to be divided into four tiles, the display zone having 1024×768 pixels is split into four regions each having 512×384 pixels (width divided by 2 and height divided by 2). After shrinking processing, the four images are placed in upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right regions of the display zone in sequence, thereby achieving the objective of splitting the display zone. However, this technique is suitable merely for splitting the display zone into four or sixteen regular tiles, and is generally used for displaying monitored areas on a security monitoring device. Such technique does not allow a user to conveniently adjust the divided regions as needed, nor does it allow for more design changes, so that it is not suitable for use in the aforesaid widescreen notebook computer.
In short, since a system and method for splitting a display zone of a screen to facilitate user operation of a notebook computer (particularly, a widescreen notebook computer) are unavailable, a need has arisen to develop a system and method that allows for convenient operation by the user and that exploits the special attributes of a widescreen notebook computer.